Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

University Professor Chastised For Using Tor

Posted by kdawson on from the control-freaks-ascendent dept.

Irongeek_ADC writes with a first-person account from the The Chronicle of Higher Education by a university professor who was asked to stop using Tor. University IT and campus security staffers came knocking on Paul Cesarini's door asking why he was using the anonymizing network. They requested that he stop and also that he not teach his students about it. The visitors said it was likely against university policy (a policy they probably were not aware that Cesarini had helped to draft). The professor seems genuinely to appreciate the problems that a campus IT department faces; but in the end he took a stand for academic freedom.

20 of 623 comments (clear)

  1. Bravo by QuantumG · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Good to see some university professors still have integrity.

    --
    How we know is more important than what we know.
    1. Re:Bravo by Maxo-Texas · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I wish I had "tenure" at my day to day job.

      --
      She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
    2. Re:Bravo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      He is an assistant professor. He is unlikely to have tenure.

    3. Re:Bravo by __aagmrb7289 · · Score: 5, Informative

      FYI (from TFA): My reason for downloading and installing the Tor plug-in was actually simple: I'd read about it for some time, was planning to discuss it in two courses I teach, and figured I should have some experience using it before I described it to my students. The courses in question both deal with controlling technology, diffusing it throughout society, and freedom and censorship online. When I cover online censorship in countries with no free press, I focus on how those countries rely on hardware, software, and phalanxes of people to make sure citizens can reach only government-approved media. Crackdowns on independent journalists, bloggers, and related dissidents all too often result in their being beaten, incarcerated, or worse. Technologies like Tor represent a beacon of freedom to people in those countries, and I would be doing my students a disservice if I didn't mention it.

    4. Re:Bravo by KerberosKing · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The thing is, tenure is earned by outstanding scholarship over years of teaching and research. It is a long-standing tradition of university life. Further, it is crucial that we as a society have high-profile people that can question and critique the status-quo of governments, companies and other powerful groups without great fear of reprisals. Such protections are needed, else the relatively low pay and long hours of professors would hardly seem worth it when contrasted with executives and their exorbitant pay.

    5. Re:Bravo by neomunk · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Child porn like everybody else?

      Fuck you.

      I have had tor installed for many moons now, and have a severe reaction to child porn (or any type of sexual abuse, especially of children) due to the fact that an overwhelming majority of women I've gotten close enough to to talk about such things have been molested at some point in their life.

      How about people who use it just because the country they are in has an abusive civil rights regime, or because they don't trust their ISP to keep their browsing habits secret? (Maybe they REALLY like the old cartoon Gem and are embarrassed about it) Maybe, just maybe, the person thinks that they are under surveillance for legal activities (like planning anti-war demonstrations).

      Forget all that, the only thing you need know about it is that it's none of your fucking business what these people are doing. The old "they wouldn't care if they aren't doing anything wrong" bit is so played out, so proven stupid, and so indicative of 'fucktardation' that if you hadn't sent a damn shiver down my spine by calling me a supporter of child porn I'd have completely ignored you.

      I couldn't though. Idiots are only dangerous when allowed to say such misinformed and ignorant things and are not called on it.

      P.S.

      Fuck you once more for implying that I'm some type of child molester (even a passive one) you freedom hating punk.

    6. Re:Bravo by miskatonic+alumnus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Right on. Why should I have to pay for a police force, judges, politicians, schools, military, highways, or anything else the public uses? I can educate my own kids, do some gardening, walk to town, and take care of myself.

    7. Re:Bravo by flithm · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Even executing my "academic freedom" would result in instant unemployment in the private sector.

      This is not necessarily true. I've actually put myself into a position where I was SURE I'd be fired for refusing to go along with a company policy that I felt to be morally (and ethically) wrong. When you have righteousness on your side you'd be amazed at what can actually happen. (I wasn't fired, and I didn't follow policy).

      I'm not saying you're lying or anything, because I don't know your situation. But I do know how scary it is to put yourself out there like that, and I know that it's a lot easier to say "Ohh pfft, he's in academia so he can get away with that... I could never do that." But really that's nothing more than an excuse.

      There's plenty of situations where someone in the private sector could get away with a lot more than someone in academia, and vice versa. Making an insinuation that somehow life is easier in academia is not only wrong, but it's also a little insulting to what he decided to put himself through.

      I'm not suggesting that you start using Tor even if it's against company policy (that would be something entirely different than what he did), but executing your basic rights as an individual will not result in instant unemployment.

      Stand up for what you believe in! If it gets your fired, you're working in the wrong place. If you worked somewhere that wasn't going to immediately fire you for doing something you feel to be just, then maybe your blood pressure wouldn't be so high!

    8. Re:Bravo by neomunk · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Are you shitting me? So by that logic everyone in Florida who's paid any taxes, or even anyone who's bought anything IN Florida and paid state sales tax on it was funding ole' cyber-fondle Foley's (attempted?, completed?) trysts with underage boys?

      Or even better, everyone in the U.S. who has in any way paid for any road construction, well they've supported every criminal who tried to get away by car.

      C'mon now, who's next in line for trying to tell me that the desire of privacy is indicative of criminal behavior.

    9. Re:Bravo by san · · Score: 5, Insightful

      In the case of health care, governments are known for low costs and high quality. Total medical expenditure per capita in western countries with universal healthcare tends to be around a quarter of what it is in the US, and people live longer and healthier lives.

      These are fairly well established facts (I'm not going to dig up references now, but for example, there was a Nature article last year on how Brits live longer than Americans -- even if you account for any conceivable cultural/economical/whatever difference, and Brits have a lower life expectancy than other European countries. That should get you started). You can also easily look up medical expenditure per capita.

      Whether you want universal healthcare should mainly be a political question: it does, undeniably, take away freedom (you're going to be taxed and you don't have a very direct say on how that money gets spent --- you're still free to go to any doctor you want if you're willing to pay more for it).

      In many countries, people think it's worth the trade-off.

    10. Re:Bravo by TheCarp · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Civil liberties and government funding have little to do with it.

      Its about academic freedom, and freedom of inquery.

      Realise I worked in IT at a major university. I was there when we decided to impliment virus scanning, not even spam filtering (I was there for that too) but just virus scanning.

      It was debated because well... what if someone had a legitimate acedemic need to recieve viruses in email?

      Seriously! We gave unfettered internet access. Porn? Well... guess what... someone may be doing acedemic research into porn and needs to access porn sites. These are legitimate debates that come up in that environment because... they take the persuit of intellectual inquery as serious buisness... because it IS their buisness.

      No firewalls, no filtering... unfettered access, because if someone needs it, they need it.

      -Steve

      --
      "I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
    11. Re:Bravo by PopeRatzo · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Even gold-plated health coverage shouldn't cost 6k for everybody if it was done right.

      I mean, most people are not usually sick. And I'm sick of people pointing to Canada or Britain and saying: "see, universal coverage doesn't work". We're the USA, goddammit, and we can spit farther, screw longer and piss farther than any other country on the planet, so you'd think we could figure this thing out so we don't have to have kids going without being able to see a doctor when they get sick. The fact that we have such a high infant mortality rate should cause every one of us to be ashamed. Once and for all, can we just build a good health-care system for every American and maybe put gay marriage, protecting the children from video games, and flag-burning amendments on the back burner for just a little while?

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
  2. ill prepared? by mhokie · · Score: 5, Insightful
    "The visitors said it was likely against university policy"

    Could they not be bothered with actually checking the policy since they were there to enforce it?

    1. Re:ill prepared? by Kadin2048 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Well, we can't say for sure now, because it's not like TFA included a copy of the relevant policy (although, if someone wanted to, they could probably figure out where the guy in the article works, and find the policy from there), but he admits that it's vaguely written, and was written back before Tor existed. So there are two immediate issues:

      1) The policy may be so vague, as written, so as to make it unclear whether Tor is legitimate or not. For instance, it could simply have a blanket prohibition of doing things that are detrimental to the network, but not specify exactly what's prohibited and allowed. This is fairly common in most AUPs that I've read, particularly academic ones; rather than attempting to specifically outline what you can't do, they basically say "anything that's bad, don't do it." (Usually in a more verbose fashion, but that's the general idea.) Sometimes they're clear about who decides what is 'bad,' other times less so. It all depends on how bright a person wrote the policy.

      2) The policy, as written, may actually prohibit Tor, but the faculty member, who said he was part of the committee that wrote the policy, believes that owing to the age of the policy and his knowledge of the writers intentions, that it was never intended to prohibit something like Tor. Thus, his usage, while technically in violation, he believes is OK because -- to put it bluntly -- he knows what behaviors the policy was supposed to prohibit better than the sysadmin does. (This seems like it could be a dangerous position for him to take, but I guess if you've got tenure, you might as well use it.)

      --
      "Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
  3. half reasonable request by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Asking the professor not to use Tor on the university-owned network is reasonable.
    Attempting to censure what he can say to his students is clearly not reasonable.

  4. Re:Bowling Green State University by thesupermikey · · Score: 5, Insightful

    it might also be noted the BGSU, along with other state universities in ohio force graduate students on assistantships to sign forms saying that they are not members, or have not supported terrorist groups.

    Since these are stored in university archives, and not checked, new graduate studies are (more or less) required by the state to sign loyalty oaths.

    --
    Mikey
    I've always been the kinda guy to fall for the girl dressed like an eskimo.
  5. Re:the ivory tower by wernst · · Score: 5, Informative
    I'm not sure what the story is here, the right to use tor on someone elses network? Does he have that right? It's not his network. I've used tor at home, but completely understand I cant use it at work, and if during my university days, had it existed (maybe it did but whatever), and was told I couldnt use it, I'd just deal with that.

    What are you talking about?

    The use of tor on "someone else's network" is implicit, because you are connecting to someone on the other side of the network as a whole.

    You say you use tor at home, but that's not "your" network either. I think your ISP would say that you are connecting to *their* network. I think the Hosting Provider of the web server you're connecting to would say it is *their* network. I think AT&T, (or whoever owns the backbone your data is traveling across) would say it is *their* network too.

    If any of these network owners told you to stop using tor at home, what would you say to that? I'm guessing it would be pretty close to what this professor said to the IT goons trying to intimidate him into stopping.

    The only time it's "your" network is when you have two of your own computers on your own LAN, and a tor router between them.

  6. Re:But... by baptiste · · Score: 5, Insightful
    It's not overblown at all. Just like the earlier article about the RIAA sending cease and desist just because you were in a swarm, not actually up or downloading. This professor was doing something completely legal and as asked by law enforcement to stop - it is inferred because they could not monitor his activities. This has a chilling effect. Notice that it wasn't just an IT person requesting he stop - he showed up with two detectives - who probably instigated the entire thing.

    Common sense would dictate that the detectives, doing their jobs and trying to investigate an online scam, ask the professor some questions to determine if he was involved. But instead they asked him to stop doing something legal, tried to get him to NOT share something with his students, and used some vague provisions of an IT policy to back it up. This is a direct attack on academic freedom - 'Thou shalt not tell your students about this' and even worse, telling him not to use Tor himself - obviously because they couldn't track what he was doing.

    Overblown? Hardly - we are losing our rights bit by bit by bit and people who think something like this is 'overblown' are part of the reason. By the time you all realize you've lost most of your rights it'll be too late.

    --
    Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
  7. Government funding by sjbe · · Score: 5, Insightful

    how many businesses do you know, outside the aviation industry, that receive regular funding from the government?


    Oil, farming, auto (roads), space (NASA), rail (AMTRAK), the defense industry, telecom, utilities, ... Do I need to go on? The government subsidizes most industries to some extent and some (defense and farming among others) to a very large extent. Sometimes it's grants, sometimes it's in the form of tax relief, sometimes its as a customer but the government funds a huge variety of industries.
  8. peeve: "vast" majority by David+Gould · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I can't stand how the word "majority" has in recent years disappeared from our language and been replaced by the phrase " vast majority" (at least in any context that's even remotely political).

    This may sound like mere linguistic pedantry, but it really isn't -- this usage both feeds, and is part of, the trend toward polarization and "extremification" (yes, afaik, I just made up that word) of political discourse. When you claim not just a majority but a vast majority, you're doing more than just adding emphasis: you're actively marginalizing the other side (by implying that they're not just a minority but a tiny, insignificant minority).

    And it's self-escalating: it creates a sort of "linguistic arms race", where "everyone else does it", so people feel compelled to tack on the "vast", lest it sound like their side is only a mere "majority". But that just leads to linguistic inflation: when (almost) everyone says "vast", it loses its meaning, sending everyone scrambling to find ever-more-emphatic (and more insulting) modifiers, like "overwhelming".

    It may seem to make your argument sound a bit stronger, but the constant minor insults don't help us get anywhere closer to building true consenus. After all, wouldn't the overwhelming majority prefer to see a political arena with more true communication and less poo-flinging?

    --
    David Gould
    main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}